“I realize that I am a soldier of production whose duties are as important in this war as those of the man behind the gun.” So began the pledge that many home front men took at the outset of World War II when they went to work in the factories, fields, and mines while their compatriots fought in the battlefields of Europe and on the bloody beaches of the Pacific. The male experience of working and living in wartime America is rarely examined, but the story of men like these provides a crucial counter-narrative to the national story of Rosie the Riveter and GI Joe that dominates scholarly and popular discussions of World War II. In Meet Joe Copper, Matthew L. Basso describes the formation of a powerful, white, working-class masculine ideology in the decades prior to the war, and shows how it thrived—on the job, in the community, and through union politics. Basso recalls for us the practices and beliefs of the first- and second-generation immigrant copper workers of Montana while advancing the historical conversation on gender, class, and the formation of a white ethnic racial identity. Meet Joe Copper provides a context for our ideas of postwar masculinity and whiteness and finally returns the men of the home front to our reckoning of the Greatest Generation and the New Deal era.

"The mid-nineteenth-century gold rushes bring to mind raucous mining camps and slapped-together cities populated by carousing miners, gamblers, and prostitutes. And yet many of the white men who went to the gold fields were products of the Victorian era: the same people popularly remembered as strait-laced, repressed, and order-loving. How do we make sense of this difference? Examining the closely linked gold rushes in California and British Columbia, historian Christopher Herbert shows that gold rushers worried about the meaning of white manhood in the near-anarchic, ethnically mixed societies that grew up around the mines. Their anxieties about reproducing the white male dominance they were accustomed to played a central role in the construction of colonial regimes. As white gold rushers flocked to the mines, they encountered a wide range of people they considered inferior and potentially dangerous to white dominance, including Indigenous people, Latin Americans, Australians, and Chinese. The way that white miners interacted with these groups reflected the distinct political principles and strategies of the US and British colonial governments, as well as the ideas about race and respectability the newcomers brought with them. In addition to renovating traditional understandings of the Pacific Slope gold rushes, Herbert argues that historians' understanding of white manliness has been too fixated on the Eastern United States and Britain. In the nineteenth century, popular attention largely focused on the West, and it was in the gold fields and the cities they spawned that new ideas of white manliness emerged, prefiguring transformations elsewhere."--Provided by publisher.

"During the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era, thousands upon thousands of American men devoted their time and money to the creation of an unsought - and in some quarters unwelcome - revived state militia. In this book, Eleanor L. Hannah studies the social history of the National Guard, focusing on issues of manhood and citizenship as they relate to the rise of the state militias." "The implications of this book are far-reaching, for it offers historians a fresh look at a long-ignored group of men and unites social and cultural history to explore changing notions of manhood and citizenship during years of frenetic change in the American landscape."--BOOK JACKET.

Butte, Montana, long deserved its reputation as a wide-open town. Mining Cultures shows how the fabled Montana city evolved from a male-dominated mining enclave to a community in which men and women participated on a more equal basis as leisure patterns changed and consumer culture grew. Mary Murphy looks at how women worked and spent their leisure time in a city dominated by the quintessential example of "men's work": mining. Bringing Butte to life, she adds in-depth research on church weeklies, high school yearbooks, holiday rituals, movie plots, and news of local fashion to archival material and interviews. A richly illustrated jaunt through western history, Mining Cultures is the never-told chronicle of how women transformed the richest hill on earth.

Kimmel's history of men in America demonstrates that manhood has meant very different things in different eras.